A Curated List of Falsehoods Programmers Believe In

github.com

88 points·pul··9 comments

This is amazing.

I don't think these kinds of lists are necessarily always true, or always relevant, but I think they are great at provoking thought, and great at reminding us that real life is impossible to cleanly codify into a computer model.

> reminding us that real life is impossible to cleanly codify into a computer model.

Also see Joe Armstrong's talk, The Mess We Are In: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

It's also important to remind people to not roll your own when battle-tested libraries exist.

(The exception being, of course, building something for the sake of learning. By all means, build your own date formatting functions, but don't put them in production.)

Assuming that the library exactly serves the needs of the project without much cruft, or the cost of rolling your own is higher than using a library all else considered, and the library is well written and documented, then I agree.

As a completely unrelated aside, I wonder if there should be a "Falsehoods programmers believe about libraries"

I'd certainly like to see "Falsehoods programmers believe about passwords". And for that matter, "Falsehoods programmers believe about programming", and possibly "Falsehoods programmers believe about falsehoods". ;)

Previous discussion of two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13637102

It would have useful overlap here, but an awesome "Falsehoods about Programmers" would also be helpful.

Addendum:

"This bug must come from backend" "This bug must come from frontend"

"Falsehoods Believed by Programmers" ?

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